[Julie Steiner]

I appreciated the following Twitter essay (unrolled) about the letter, and think others will, too:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...692234753.html

For those unfamiliar with the term "sea-lioning":
http://wondermark.com/1k62/

[Mark McDonnell]

It's an interesting piece and largely true I’m sure, and the sea-lion cartoon is genius, but it completely misses the point of the letter. The letter isn't complaining about the impossibility of reasoned debate on the internet (as this suggests). It's complaining about the real life consequences, including being fired, of saying the 'wrong' thing or being on the 'wrong' side of a debate, both on and offline.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Mark,

Are there scenarios where a person's speech should get them fired? The obvious answer is yes. It's not an infringement of free speech--they're not going to jail.

If we all agree that there are some things a person could say that could and should lead to an employer, we're discussing where that line is. The reality, though, is most people don't actually get "cancelled," and when they are fired, it's because the organization thinks it's not worth having someone like that in their midst.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...burst-n1233161

This man was fired. Is this about his speech being infringed, or is this ultimately about him being a jerk and not being aware we live in a world always being recorded? Why would a real estate agency want this guy working for them?

Meanwhile, DeSean Jackson (an American football player for the Philadelphia Eagles) said a whole bunch of terrible antisemitic things on instagram. He still has his job. Why? The team thinks he'll still make them money. So much for cancellation...

Ultimately if speech is being "chilled" it's because of the panopticon. "Cancel culture" is a natural consequence of the fact that now, when you're in public, everything you do and say is public.

[Mark McDonnell]

Andrew,

I haven't read beyond your opening question yet, the answer to which, I agree, is yes. That misses the simple point I was making that the link Julie posted had missed the point of the Harpers letter. This whole issue seems to lead to a tendency for people to miss the point.

[Julie Steiner]

Okay, if the point of the letter is concern that the free exchange of ideas is constricted by the chilling effects of "real life consequences, including being fired, of saying the 'wrong' thing or being on the 'wrong' side of a debate, both on and offline," maybe you will find Elizabeth Picciuto's take more on topic. Snippets (bolding mine):

I believe the signers would agree with me that the most clear-cut free speech violation is when the state uses its power to punish citizens who criticize it. I believe they would also agree that someone’s free speech is violated when they are threatened with physical injury or death for speaking, even if the threat is made by a person who is not in government. Even though such violations are currently occurring, the signers’ focus is elsewhere.

Their primary concern is that social, cultural, and institutional (but not governmental, except perhaps in its role as an employer) pressures will be brought to bear on people simply for expressing their beliefs. Their letter decries that people have been fired and publicly shamed for their words, that certain works of journalism or art have not been published or exhibited, that creators and academics feel constricted in what they can express without retribution.

They write, “The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”

An intolerant society can sometimes inhibit speech wrongly. But it is absolutely not the equivalent of a repressive government inhibiting speech.

They are missing the free speech forest for a few free speech trees. Government inhibition of speech is wrong, full stop. Threatened and actual violence in retaliation for speech are wrong, full stop. Firings, deplatformings, and social stigma for self-expression are not always wrong. They are wrong on a case-by-case basis.

Social, cultural, and institutional pressures in response to self-expression can absolutely be cruel or unjust, even if I don’t always agree with the signers about which specific cases are the cruel or unjust ones. In at least one case I think they are referencing — “a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study” — I absolutely agree that firing was unjust.

[...]

Such consequences, though, are not antithetical to a marketplace of ideas. They are part of that marketplace. It is a legitimate, even worthy, endeavor to determine whether a specific person who has been fired, socially rejected, or unpublished due to their beliefs was treated unjustly. The letter, though, argues from the position that firing, social rejection, and deplatforming due to expressed beliefs is inherently wrong — that such actions create a “stifling atmosphere,” part of “the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.” If there are some expressed beliefs the writers believe warrant social consequences, they do not say.

[...]

If all speech is worth defending, even the expression of bad ideas, then surely speech that is harshly critical of writers, that demands someone’s firing, that rejects a given work, would be worth defending. Yet the signers are using their cultural and institutional power to convince people to hesitate to express beliefs about who deserves to be fired or socially stigmatized.

[...]

The letter signers evidently think some speech is harmful, because the entire point of their letter is to argue that speech that demands firings or stigmatization brings about an illiberal society. They are not arguing that such speech should be checked by the state — or by anything but their and ideally others’ criticism — but it is still an acknowledgement that some speech has serious consequences, and speakers should therefore hesitate before expressing it.

[Mark McDonnell]

He still has his job. Why? The team thinks he'll still make them money. So much for cancellation...

Or, more likely, the DeSean Jackson story just didn’t get the online ‘cancel machine‘ revving enough, so his team think they can ride it out. I’d not heard this story, but looking it up it seems not to have caused too much of a Twitter storm. I can’t see any news stories that quote any condemnation from ordinary social media users, which these stories are usually full of, and apparently none of his team have condemned him. Several comments on his Twitter seem to be along the lines of “where is the outrage about this?”. Maybe, despite the obvious antisemitism, the fact that he ostensibly posted it in support of racial justice for African Americans makes it too confusing a story for the black and white world of social media outrage.

[Quincy Lehr]

This essay by Jeet Heer makes some useful points, particularly:

"Some of the signatories can fairly be taxed with being the rankest of hypocrites when it comes to free speech. This is especially true of speech that expresses solidarity for Palestinians or speech that is, God forbid, voiced by actual Palestinians. These unreliable free-speech advocates include New York Times editor Bari Weiss, literary scholar Cary Nelson, and political scientist Yascha Mounk....

"With free speech advocates like Weiss, Nelson, and Mounk, the forces of censorship will always enjoy a good night’s sleep. Yet to simply say that Weiss and company are hypocrites is only half the story. Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite when he penned 'all men are created equal.' Jefferson’s slave-owning doesn’t discredit the principles he articulated. Rather, the principles give us language with which to criticize Jefferson. In the same way, the letter I signed provides standards by which hypocrites can be held accountable."

[Julie Steiner]

Fortunately, nothing else of note is going on this week, while writers are focused on this.

[Mark McDonnell]

OK. Long one then I'm definitely done. All I've been waiting for is one person, just one, to post something even vaguely in favour of the ideas in this letter, so I don't feel like a lone madman. So cheers Quincy.

I do agree in some ways with the first article you posted, Julie, that the pressure cooker of social media has a lot to do with this. The combination of identity politics and social media has somehow created subjects drenched in taboo, and when it kicks up a big stink about these subjects institutions respond by capitulating to it and people get fired, or otherwise smeared. And quite often these consequences are unjust. There's nothing wrong with either social media or identity politics, in sensible doses, but things have gone beyond sensible. These taboos usually, not always, revolve around issues of race and gender. These are sensitive subjects. People can say things about these subjects that will reveal attitudes that are genuinely hateful and for which they should be condemned and probably fired. I don't think anyone reading the Harpers letter sympathetically would imagine that its writers are free-speech absolutists. The clear implication is that in many cases the bar for what constitutes acceptable speech has been set too low. But another taboo of the left is that it is reluctant to allow for any acknowledgement that the above might be true, or if it is that it's anything more than a fringe phemomena. Why? Because that‘s the sort of thing that the right would say. So the whole argument becomes maddeningly circular. Yes, the letter is annoying in its vagueness, so here's some recent specifics off the top of my head. You'll have heard it all before:

For the first time in its 160 year history, The Nation magazine publicly apologises for publishing a poem, and the poet, Carlson Wee, is pressured to apologise too, because the poem was a persona poem in the voice of a speaker from a different racial background. Why? Twitter storm.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/t...o-controversy/

A young YA fantasy novelist, whose book had already been accepted for publication, is made to apologise and retract the novel from publication after extracts are leaked online, because the book contains "problematic representations". Here’s one example, but this has happened several times. Why? Twitter storms.

https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/bl...ntroversy.html


Musician and archivist Mary Jane Leach has her performance in the second half of an avant-garde arts festival cancelled, because of complaints during the interval that in her first-half lecture on the black avant-garde musician Julius Eastman (about whom she is an expert) she spoke aloud the names of his own compositions, two of which contained the 'n' word. Why? Live storm! (but I bet the people who complained spend a lot of time on Twitter)

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/new...-titles-13168/

Data scientist David Shor retweets a peer reviewed article by a black sociologist which argues for the merits of peaceful protest. He's fired. Why? Twitter storm.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...es-bennet.html

72 year old Nobel Prize winning scientist Tim Hunt is forced to resign from all his academic and honourary posts after a conference speech in Korea. He was asked what he thought about women in the sciences and replied that men and women in labs together are a bad idea because "you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry". Why? Twitter storm. (What wasn't reported were the words he immediately followed this with, which made clear it was a joke. A really bad one, but he's a 72 year old biochemist. He isn't required to be funny or 'woke': "Now seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without a doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women. And you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”)

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...w-mary-collins


Maya Forsteter, a woman who worked at the Centre For Global Development tweeted, in response to news about changes to the UK Gender Recognition Act:
"What I am so surprised at is that smart people who I admire, who are absolutely pro-science in other areas, and champion human rights & women's rights are tying themselves in knots to avoid saying the truth that men can't change into women (because that might hurt men's feelings)"

She was fired. Why? Twitter storm. She took the case to court and lost. This is what got Rowling into trouble initially and led to the mother of all Twitter storms after Rowling tweeted #istandwithmaya during the trial. Whatever you think about this, it does strike me as odd that I never hear about the countless people who post things like "friendly reminder. if youre a terf I will slice your throat and sever your spinal column" getting fired.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...t-trans-rights

https://mobile.twitter.com/tibby17/s...86483807113221

This is my list, obviously. I still haven't got round to working out what all the vague examples in the letter refer to. And I won't because as soon as I post this I'm going to stop thinking about it all. An interesting thing about all these cases is that the people on the receiving end of the outrage were all, to one degree or another, fairly liberal themselves. The social media mob seems to like to turn on its own, rather than doing something worthwhile like bringing down some actual bigots (you may well disagree, particularly about Forsteter). Also, apart from Hunt, none of them are particularly prestigious. All of this is ironic, given that many of the criticisms of the Harper’s letter are about them picking on the wrong targets.

So. Critics of the Harpers letter will say that these instances and the many others like them pale in comparison with the state violence and censorship inflicted by Trump. The other article Julie pasted says "I believe the signers would agree with me that the most clear-cut free speech violation is when the state uses its power to punish citizens who criticize it...Even though such violations are currently occurring, the signers’ focus is elsewhere." Well, yes, the signers of the letter clearly do agree with this. The text says, very plainly: "The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting". Read that again. A real threat to democracy. That's far more strongly worded than than anything the letter says about the examples it gives. The letter doesn't focus on state repression, no, but it has clearly set its stall out, and to complain about this lack of focus is akin to reading an article about the lack of female representation in US boardrooms then complaining that the writer doesn't care about the much greater injustices faced by women in Saudi Arabia. The point might have some truth to it, butt would be annoying "whataboutism". Highlighting what something fails to include doesn't invalidate what it does.

Critics of the letter are also saying that these privileged writers are just annoyed because speech has become democratised and they are no longer the cultural gatekeepers. This ignores the fact that the loud voices of so-called 'cancel culture' don't actually represent most people and have just become a new kind of cultural gatekeeper. There are millions of people, who dont spend all day on Twitter, who read about this stuff in the mainstream media and think the world has gone slightly mad. They may not have had a university education and they aren't versed in the language of intersectionality and gender theory. They bear absolutely no animosity (if they're white) toward black people and would vote for politicians who support them, but they are tired of constantly reading about their own white privilege as they struggle through their difficult lives. They bear no animosity toward transgender people and would support any laws to end discrimination against them, but they simply can't shake their instinctive, intuitive feeling that there is some fundamental difference between a trans woman and a woman, and they are tired of being told how hateful they are to think this. These people are not evil and they don't need to be reeducated about anything, they just want to get on with their lives. These are the people the left needs on its side. The second half of the quote from the letter, "which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting" is the important point. The left are gifting these people to Trump, by focusing on the minutae of identity politics rather than the left wing fundamentals of economics, class and wealth distribution, which would benefit people from all identities. By consistently endorsing, or at least not condemning strongly enough, these social media fuelled ‘woke‘ witch-hunts, writers and politicians on the left are fuelling a culture that will continue to capitulate to the voices of a small group of permanently outraged tweeters, and allow Trump and the right in general to characterise the left as extremist, intolerant SJWs.

Ironically, Bernie Sanders, the truly progressive left wing candidate in the US, had this stuff thrown at him when he was completely unjustifiably accused of sexism by another Democrat for something there was no evidence of him having said.

The Harpers letter isn't the Holy Grail. It has its problems, not least the hypocrisy of some of the signatories. And, yes, it should have gone further in making the point that the Trump administration is curtailing freedom in far more dangerous ways. But I agree with the substance of it and I agree with the substance (and headline) of the article Quincy just linked to: The Left Needs to Reclaim Free Speech.

[Max Goodman]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

it does strike me as odd that I never hear about the countless people who post things like "friendly reminder. if youre a terf I will slice your throat and sever your spinal column" getting fired.

The death threats are a real problem. I can only assume that the reason they are made without (apparent) consequences is that they are anonymous and the platforms on which they are made resist exposing the criminals. This is one of the ways tech companies are allowed to damage us with impunity. If you or I provided someone with a way to anonymously commit a crime, we'd face consequences. There should be consequences for companies that do that.

Even anonymous users can be denounced and shunned, and I agree with Mark('s implication) that we should condemn threats of violence at least as vociferously as we condemn other speech we find hateful.